L. NEIL SMITH: Sean Gabb, any attempt to introduce you adequately to
our readers would end up as long as the rest of this interview. You
are a man of many accomplishments, and there are plenty of things this
long-overdue discussion might be about. From my viewpoint, for
example, you are British libertarianism.

But you're also one of the most hardworking and productive writers I
know of, magnificently adept at both fiction and non-fiction. So let's
make this simply a writer-to-writer conversation and see what happens.

First question: the great Raymond Chandler once famously said, "The
only salvation for a writer is to write". What is it that drives you
to write as much as you do?

Dr. SEAN GABB: I write for many reasons. I write because I have
something to say, because I want other people to hear me, because I
want to change the world, because I'm vain, because I'd go mad if I
couldn't write, because I want people to speak about me after I'm
dead, because I hope it will eventually bring in more cash than
getting a regular job, because I'm rather good at it. I'm sure there
are many other reasons for writing. Each one in itself could be the
excuse for an essay.

Let's deal, however, with writing as a compulsion, which covers
several of the points given above. If I were to say I'd never changed
my mind, I'd be lying. But I will say that I've had certain basic
opinions about the world for as long as I've been able to think beyond
"Seanie wants potty!"

The most basic of these is that the world would be a better place if
we could all agree to stop pushing each other around. Just behind
this, or perhaps in front, is that English civilisation is a very fine
thing, and anyone who disagrees should go and live somewhere else.
There might, I'll admit, be a slight lack of consistency between these
opinions. But my entire life has seen a progressive collapse of
civility and due process liberty, and a decline of England so fast and
so complete that the Spanish decadence of the 17th century was smooth
by comparison. It's got to the point where I feel almost embarrassed
to be English.

I can do without the Empire. Many of my ancestors seem to have done
the crappier jobs in its conquest and defence and general
administration. But I can't think I have any moral right to enjoy it
now. What really angers me is that the same class of degenerates who
let the Empire slip away is still messing things up. That class is a
founder-member of the New World Order. While spouting crap about
shifting comparative advantage, it stuffed working class dissent by
shutting down British industry, and turning the country into a
gigantic casinoa casino employing people with names like Justin
and Tarquin as the head croupiers. It's bleeding us white in taxes.
It's suppressing all enterprise and initiative in what looks like a
deliberate attack on the people. It's a class that has corrupted and
dirtied everything it touched. More to the point, it now rules through
an increasingly ruthless police state.

All this used to make my friend Chris R. Tame so angry, that I really
believe he died of cancer as a result. What keeps me in reasonable
health is the ability to spray hate for these people all over the
Internet. My only regret, when I look at the million words or so I've
written of denunciation is that they've had so little effect so far.

NEIL: Although I also write non-fiction, I've always believedbased
on the efforts of H.G. Wells, Edward Bellamy, Eric Frank Russell,
Robert Heinlein, and Ayn Rand, among othersthat fiction can be a
better teacher of political philosophy. Why do you write fiction, and
is your expectation any different than when you write non-fiction?

SEAN: The short answer is that I've always liked stories. I've always
been a daydreamerI've always had a crowded and enjoyable dream
life. I've always wanted to write fiction much more than anything
else. I was writing short stories at school. I wrote three novels in
my twenties and two in my thirties. None of these got published, and I
sometimes feel a certain regret that they have probably faded from the
non-standard disks on which I put them. But I started again in 2005,
and have written eight since then.

Writing fiction ticks all the boxes given above. But let's talk about
the political aspects. There is a relative lack of sustained cultural
production within the conservative and libertarian movements. We've
always been strong on analysis and criticism. We have our philosophers
and economists and historians, and these are among the best. We aren't
wholly without our novelists and musicians and artists. There's you.
There's Heinlein. There's Rand. There are many others.

But we haven't so far put cultural production at the top of our list
of things to do. It's been treated as barely even secondary to
uncovering and explaining the workings of a natural order. So far as
this has been the case, however, it's been a big mistake. There's
little benefit in preaching to an audience that doesn't understand why
your message is important.

The socialist takeover of the English mind during the early 20th
century was only in part the achievement of the Webbs and J.A. Hobson
and E.H. Carr and Harold Laski and Douglas Jay, and all the others of
their kind. They were important, and if they hadn't written as they
did, there would have been no takeover. But for every one who read
these, there were tens or hundreds who read and were captured by Shaw
and Wells and Galsworthy and Richard Llewellyn, among others. These
were men who transmitted the socialist cases to a much wider audience.

Just as importantly, where they did not directly transmit, they helped
bring about a change in the climate of opinion so that propositions
that were rejected out of hand by most thoughtful men in the 1890s
could become the received wisdom of the 1940s. They achieved a similar
effect in the United States, and were supplemented there by writers
like Howard Fast, and, of course, by the Hollywood film industry.

More recently in England, the effect of television soap operas like
Eastenders has been immense and profound. Their writers have taken
the dense and often incomprehensible writings of the neo-Marxists and
presented them as a set of hidden assumptions that have transformed
the English mind since 1980. No one can fully explain the Labour
victory of 1997, or the ease with which law and administration were
transformed even before them, without reference to popular culture.

Though I'll say outright that she's never been one of my favourites,
there's no doubt that Ayn Rand was a great novelist and a great
libertarian. And there's no doubt at all that her novels did more than
anything else to revive libertarianism in Americaand perhaps even
in England. But what I'm talking about at the moment isn't long
didactic novels where characters speak for three pages about the evils
of central banking. What I do believe we need is good, popular
entertainment of our own creation that is based on our own
assumptions.

I think the most significant objective propagandist of my lifetime for
the libertarian and conservative cause in England was the historical
novelist Patrick O'Brian. I've read all his historical novels, some
more than once, and I don't think he ever sets out an explicit case
against the modern order of things. What he does instead is to create
a worldthat may once have existed largely as he describes it
that works on different assumptions from our own. If this world is
often unattractive on account of its poverty and brutality, its
settled emphasis on tradition and on personal freedom and
responsibility has probably done more to spread the truth in England
than the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Ideas
combined.

And, now I mention these organisations, I really do groan at most of
the stuff they bring out. If they really wanted to win the battle of
ideas, they'd do better to cancel a few of those dreary policy
documents, and put the money instead into a ballet about the early
life of Ludwig von Mises.

NEIL: You've written a good many excellent novels under your own name
and otherwise, but you've expressed dissatisfaction with what you see
as an inability to persuade British publishers to print your science
fiction. What do you suppose is at the root of this problem, and what
plans do you have, if any, to fix it?

SEAN: There are many reasons why a publisher may turn down your work.
The most likely is that he doesn't think it will make money. I suspect
that is the case with my own science fiction novelsthough I also
suspect that anyone who believes this is mistaken. While it came out
through my own publishing company, The Churchill Memorandum has done
rather well, and would probably do better still with a mainstream
publisher behind it.

My most recent science fiction novel is an apocalyptic fantasy called
The Break. It's set in an England, just a few years in the future,
that has somehow reverted to the year 1065. There was a big storm,
eleven months before the start of the novel. When it had cleared,
everything in the UK mainland was the samebut the whole world,
starting 300 yards from the shore, had gone back 900 years to just
before the Norman Conquest. Forget any talk, in this scenario, of
shared adversity. What happens is that a ruling class, even more
degenerate than it now is, rolls out a naked police state and lets a
third of the population starve to death. Several millions more are
rounded up and deported to mediaeval Ireland and set to work on making
the place into a plantation.

The main characters in this nightmare are a young woman called
Jennifer and a stray Byzantine called Michael. Why is the British
State so eager to lay hands on Michael? What really happened to
Jennifer's parents? Above all, what is the American Secretary of State
doing in London?

I think it's rather good. Sadly, it sprawls across so many genres, and
is so scathing about modern England, that every publisher I've
approached has told me the novel is highly readable but unprintable.
Even my normal publisher won't touch it.

What to do about this? I suppose the answer is to keep trying. There
must be a publisher somewhere in the English-speaking world who will
bring out my science fiction. It's a question of finding the right
one.

NEIL: You've written four science fiction novels so far. I wonder if
you'd name them and tell us as much as you wish about each one of
them.

SEAN:Accidental Qualities (1985) was a less than devout retelling
of the Gospel story from the point of view of Erich von Daniken. I
enjoyed describing a massacre by Roman soldiers in Jerusalem, and the
character of Pilate was probably amusing. But I don't think the world
is losing much from the existence of the novel in a handwritten first
draft.

In The Return of the Skolli (1995), it is 2014, and England has
become a vicious but down-at-the-heel police state, with broken
security cameras and a vestigial PC legitimising ideology.

Philip Phiston is a petty thief who's been found out at work and
sacked. Before leaving the building, he looks through the basement and
finds a nice-looking attache case. When he gets this back to his
sordid lodgings in South London, he drinks himself to sleep. When he
wakes up, the attache case has turned into a notebook computerwith
a 1Gb memory! This is sentient and demands access to the Internet.

Cutting a long story short, this object has been around for 40
million years, waiting for the right kind of civilisation to come
along, after which it will construct a gateway through time for a race
of intelligent lizards called the Skolli, whose world was destroyed by
an asteroid impact.

The whole thing goes wrong, as Phiston goes on the run with the
object. After a few hundred pages of chasing and killing, we end with
a Prime Minister who dissolves into a pool of grey s lime, and the
casting back to the Skolli to their own time.

It's quite a good novelor could be. One day, I will see how much
of it survives on the 3.5" floppy on which it is stored.

The premise of The Churchill Memorandum (2011) is as follows:

It was Thursday the 16th March 1939. The Fuhrer had spent twenty-two
hours in Prague to inspect his latest conquest. During this time, the
people of that city had barely been aware of his presence in the
Castle. But as the Mercedes accelerated to carry him back to the
railway station, one of the armoured cars forming his guard got stuck
in the tramlines that lay just beyond the Wenzelsplatz. The Fuhrer's
car swerved to avoid this. On the frozen cobblestones....

Hitler is dead. There is no Second World Warno takeover of England
by the Left in 1940. Go forward twenty years, to 1959, and England is
still England. The Queen is on her throne. The pound is worth a pound.
All is right with the worldor with that quarter of it lucky enough
to repose under an English heaven.

Rejoicing in this happy state of affairs, Anthony Markham takes his
leave of a nightmarish, totalitarian America. He has a biography to
write of a dead and now largely forgotten Winston Churchill, and has
had to travel to where the old drunk left his papers. But little does
Markham realise, as he returns to his safe, orderly England, that he
carries, somewhere in his luggage, an object that can be used to
destroy England and the whole structure of bourgeois civilisation as
it has been gradually restored since 1918.

Who is trying to kill Anthony Markham? For whom is Major Stanhope
really working? Where did Dr Pakeshi get his bag of money? What
connection might there be between Michael Foot, Leader of the British
Communist Party, and Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan? Why is Ayn
Rand in an American prison, and Nathaniel Brandon living in a South
London bedsit? Where does Enoch Powell fit into the story? Above all,
what is the Churchill Memorandum? What terrible secrets does it
contain?

All will be revealedbut not till after Markham and Pakeshi have
gone on the run through an England unbombed, uncentralised, still
free, and still mysterious. How might our country have turned out but
for that catastrophic declaration of war in defence of Poland? Read on
and wonder....

The Churchill Memorandum can be read as a thriller, as a black
comedy, as a satire on political correctness. It may also warm the
hearts of anyone who suspects that the Pax Americana has been less
than a blessing for mankind, and that what civilisation we still enjoy
is threatened most by those who rule in Washington.

It came out in February 2011 to mixed acclaim and hysterical
denunciation. Several British libertarians appear to have been driven
mad by it. On these grounds alone, I suggest it's worth buying on
Amazon.

The Break (2011) we have already discussed, above.

NEIL: What would you sayto American publishers and readers
makes your novels especially different and interesting to them?

SEAN: Well, in terms of language, the difference is limited to matters
of slightly different speech patterns and a few variations of spelling
and vocabulary. My science fiction novels are nearly all set in
England, and are closely rooted there. This means they will be seen as
slightly exotic. But most American readers surely know something about
England. It isn't as if I were being translated from Uzbek. English
writers do well in America so far as what they write isn't so local as
to be incomprehensibleI think here about the large if mostly
ignored genre of novels about football (soccer), and all those family
sagas set in the north of England.

If my novels ever do well in America, it will be because American
readers enjoy reading thembecause they have original and striking
plots and are engagingly written. I think they are thator I hope
they are.

NEIL: In the end, I believe British science fiction writers, from
H. G. Wells, through Eric Frank Russell, to Brian Aldiss and Michael
Moorcock found more willing publishers and more enthusiastic readers
in the United States than at home. Could you be satisfied if that
became the case with your life's work?

SEAN: Perfectly so. Fame is fame, and money is money. But I believe
the trade hasn't all been in one direction. I think Frank Herbert's
Dune first came out in England.

Generally, though, science fiction tends to do better in America than
in England. Why that is I can't say. I might try arguing that modern
English culture is deeply pessimistic, and people here tend to look
for escape into the past. Perhaps America remains more optimistic, and
people there still believe that the future will be better than the
present. This being said, science fiction has always been more popular
in America, and English science fiction novelists have done better in
America than at home.

This being said, I wonder if John Wyndham is much read in America? He
was a very good novelist, but his novels were all rooted in a
specifically English setting, and require a close familiarity with
English ways and assumptions.

NEIL: Speaking only for myself, I read all of Wyndham's books as a
teeneager and enjoyed them very much. And the movie The Day of the
Triffids made a pretty good splash. But in a more general sense,
what would it take to make you feel that your efforts as a science
fiction writer have been worthwhile?

SEAN: Oh, the answer to that one is a shedload of money, and standing
ovations every time I turn up at a convention. Otherwise, it would be
nice to know that I'd started a whole movement of English libertarian
novelists, who went on to have a profound impact on the English mind.
The purpose of fiction is always to entertain readers, and to give the
writer at least hopes of enrichment. But hoping for a wider
intellectual impact is legitimate.

NEIL: Finally, upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln is
said to have declared, "So you're the little lady who started the
Civil War." Do you believe that writers in general, and writers of
fiction in particular, are capable of changing the course of history?

SEAN: Oddly enough, I found a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin the other
day in my local library. I think, in general, that 19th century
American fiction is overrated and is a poor imitation of the Victorian
giants. What I read of UTC, however, struck me as first class. Stowe
knew how to write very effective English, and she ranges well between
pathos and satire and biting denunciation. Since there was no defence
possible of American slavery, I can easily imagine that she punctured
the unwillingness of most Americans to think about the issue.

Novels do change the course of history. I've said that I don't much
like Ayn Rand. But there cannot be the slightest doubt that she did
more than anyone else to revive an American libertarian movement that
was largely moribund, and that her influence spilled straight across
the Atlantic. I have very few libertarian friends who were not
initially brought over by reading Atlas Shrugged.

My own path led through the English liberals of the 19th century. But
I have written about how finding The Probability Broach in a railway
carriage got me out of an intellectual rut in my early twenties. I may
never amount to much, but one of my students may become a Conservative
cabinet minister around 2030. One thing often leads to another.

Look at George Orwell. His early novels are worth reading, so far as
they entertain and illustrate the English lefty mind of the 1930s. But
Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four did more than Hayek and Von
Mises and all the lavishly-funded anti-communist stuff of the late
1940s to discredit communism in the English-speaking world. Two
Communists got into Parliament in the 1945 general election. Nineteen
Eighty-Four came out in 1949. There were no Communists who even came
close to being elected in the 1950 general election. I think there was
a connection between these two latter events. Animal Farm is cruel
satire. But, while, before Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was possible to
lie with a straight face about Soviet Russia and not lose friends,
totalitarianism ever since has been utterly disreputable.

Looking far outside our movement, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
has become a core text of political correctness. It seems to be on
every English Literature reading list over here. But there can be no
doubt that it's a very good novel. I suspect the American South was
much more complex than this novel describes it. Nevertheless, most
Englishand perhaps Americanviews of the pre-civil rights South
is based on this one novel. It's a question of ruthless promotion onto
the reading lists, but also of inherent quality. Of course works of
fiction change history. I doubt it is more changed by anything else.

I'll say again that the corporate-funded part of the libertarian
movement turns out several hundred thousand pages a year of stuff that
may be read once by its commissioning editor. Boring at the time, it
becomes, after a few years, incomprehensible. I used to spend one
afternoon a week in the library of the Institute of Economic Affairs
in London. This has a complete run of its publication since the late
1950s. Some of these are gems that deserve much wider publication
E.G. West on education, for example. Most of them though, are dreary
thingsabout ineffective billing in the state-owned telephone
industry of the late 1960s.

I won't say these things have no influence at all. But I suspect their
influence is limited to their physical existence. They have a
descriptive title, sometimes a striking cover, and they have a
reassuring bulk. If the actual pages turned out to be filled with the
fake Latin used to display printing fonts, they would be no less
effective.

If only some part of this lavish funding could be turned to publishing
libertarian fiction. The socialists of the early 20th century went for
full spectrum coverage. We are still living with their success. There
is much that is scandalous in the gross corporatist propaganda I've
ghost-written for the pharmaceutical industry. What I find most
scandalous is that these people pay me for this dross and let their
eyes glaze over if I give them a copy of The Churchill Memorandum.

NEIL: Thank you very much, Sean. This has been an extremely
pleasurable experience and I hope we can do it again sometime.
Speaking of "boring and incomprehensible", for instance, we could talk
about CATO and the Hoover Institute.

But for now, I'll remind our readers about The Churchill Memorandum,
available in both dead-tree and Kindle formats at
Amazon.com. And I'm
sure you'll agree that the thrilling historical novels of our mutual
friend Richard Blakealso well-represented at Amazon.comcould
use a plug.